Goat Eyeballs, Scorpions on Rye

ENLARGE

Chefs serve crocodile
Karen Zieff/The Explorers Club

By

Richard Morgan

Updated March 18, 2013 9:00 p.m. ET

Just to explain to any first-timers to the Waldorf-Astoria this weekend, it is not ordinary for a bartender to inquire if Champagne should be served with or without a garnish of goat penis rolled in powdered cactus honey. But the Explorers Club Annual Dinner is not for the ordinary.

Picture John Jacob Astor asking Indiana Jones for the number of his caterer from the "Temple of Doom" movie: the menu included rattlesnake sliders, muskrat, beaver, whole-roasted hogs and a whole-roasted ostrich, Madagascar hissing cockroaches, scorpions on rye, martinis garnished with goat eyeballs, pickled bull penis, larvae and pupae of all sorts and two kinds of coffee, one whose bean was regurgitated by a weasel and one whose bean was defecated by a cat.

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Explorers Club president Alan Nichols with John Glenn
Karen Zieff/The Explorers Club

Even the whiskey was adventurous: Mackinlay's Shackleton the Journey, a recreation of the 1907 whiskey found in the arctic explorer's hut in 2010, served with glacial ice.

"I'm not much of a penis man myself," said Jim Whittaker, who was the first American to summit Mt. Everest in the year of 1963. "But I did have some goat meat that was good. Of course, nothing as good as the goat we had when we descended from the mountain, because then we were starving and that always helps." He added that the only thing hikers dreamed about more than women was a mixed-greens salad.

A courier toting a moon rock from the Apollo 15 mission approached Mr. Whittaker. "This is a piece of the moon," the courier said. Mr. Whittaker seemed nonplussed. He extended his pinky finger and its golden ring with dark gray stone. "This is a piece of Mt. Everest," he said, and tried to press the ring against the encased moon rock. An onlooker, torn between which spectacle to photograph with his phone, settled for texting his friend a string of exclamation points.

Such absurd mash-ups of extremes were par for the course in a night where Himalayan Sherpas were engaged in casual cocktail chitchat with astronauts and deep-sea divers, including John Glenn and Scott Carpenter, the last of NASA's first-ever astronaut squad, and James Cameron, who holds both the world record for biggest box-office haul and deepest solo ocean dive (he reached the Marianas Trench in the Pacific Ocean last year, the first person to do so since the first-ever expedition in 1960).

"In the first decade of this century, I made one film but six expeditions," he said.

Mr. Cameron, who was honored with a medal for his dive, converted to veganism last year and so was absolved of much of the night's esculent derring-do.

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Crickets garnish appetizers
Karen Zieff/The Explorers Club

"The biggest change you can make in your life, in your environment, is what you eat," he said, although he also noted he once ate a live six-inch shrimp where "if it wasn't squirming going down your esophagus, it didn't count."

On top of all the superlative expeditions, for good measure, literally, the dinner also awarded a medal to Erden Eruç, a 51-year-old Turk who last year became the first-ever single human-powered circumnavigator of the globe, having rowed across three oceans, walked and used bicycles, dugout canoes and sea kayaks for the rest, a journey of 5 years and 11 days.

"John Glenn said ours is a history of pushing dragons off the maps, replacing them with knowledge," said Mr. Eruç. "But we also slay our inner dragons: selfishness, ego, all of that."

During Mr. Cameron's acceptance speech, he said "Those who know me know humility doesn't come easy to me. But it's easy to be humble among explorers like these."

The night's biggest moment of exploration, by far, was the ubiquitous question: So, what does goat penis taste like?

"It tastes like conch," shrugged Gene Rurka, the head chef for the night. "But if you say that, ya gotta be sure to enunciate."

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